Why the Best Leaders Don’t Just Lead - They Design

How today's most effective leaders are creating the future they want to lead.

“The future doesn't just happen. It can be a creative act of leadership, by design.”

The Shift: From Leading to Leading and Designing

We have been taught that leadership is about setting vision, making decisions, and executing them. Which is true; however, there is more to it.  Successful leaders across business and government share another powerful trait: They treat leadership as a creative act.

They don’t just respond to change. They shape it. They design with intention.

In business, your competition isn’t just improving on what you do; they’re reimagining what’s possible. They are creating futures that didn’t exist until they imagined them, and getting a jump on you.

In government, the best leaders don’t just deliver services, they strive to serve their communities better. They are re-imagining and redesigning their services. They are looking ahead, spotting the weak change signals on the horizon, then designing to prevent tomorrow’s problems today.

These leaders don’t wait for the future to arrive. They design for it and adjust their designs as the environment shifts.

A Lesson from the Big Apple

A few years ago, I was a coach on a Better-by-Design study tour to New York with 30 New Zealand business leaders. We visited companies that hadn’t just succeeded, they had designed their way to the front of the market.

These companies shared how they reshaped their purpose, strategy and culture, not just their products or services, by design.

We frequently heard that they had embraced a design mindset in their leadership teams and at their board tables. They were leading with design to create new value, while wringing efficiencies out with other approaches such as lean.

The other day, I caught up with one of the NZ leaders, a business owner from a regional town. He told me how the study tour had created a big shift in his thinking. It helped him understand the value in his origin story and his personal “why", which had been in the background. As a result, he returned home and redesigned his business around a bolder and clearer “why,” guided by a more aspirational vision linked to his origin story on having business success and positive community impact.

The result? Growth. Impact. And top-tier talent relocating to a place many would overlook.

He didn’t wait for better conditions. He designed them.

He imagined a better future that didn’t exist, and was designing his way to it.

Designed to Lead

Leading as designing means switching between modes.

I recall one time we were mining some in-depth customer research we had done for insight, and had a range of concepts plastered along the wall.  We were due to meet with the CEO, and as he entered into the space, his Innovation director asked him to pause, take off his managerial critique hat and put on his ‘design–what could be’ hat.  The result, he mentally switched modes and leant in with all his experiential knowledge and creativity.

Leading as designing is imagining and shaping what could be, and then bringing those possibilities into reality.

1. Imagining and shaping what could be looks like:

• Thinking big and imagining better futures or new realities that don’t exist

• Treating leadership as a creative, intentional act of future-making

• Seeing possibility spaces, not just problems

• Asking: “Why does it have to be this way?” and rethinking all those assumptions floating around your environment

2. Bringing possibility into reality looks like:

• Aligning all the pieces of the jigsaw to make vision tangible (resources, relationships, systems, etc.)

• Embracing risk and moving before everything is “ready”

• Prototyping ideas early to learn and refine, then prototyping again

• Designing pathways to the imagined future or new reality.

Leadership Is Creating Better

While managers, for good reason, obsess with maintaining stability and incrementally improving processes, design-led leaders aspire to achieve high performance and leave their organisation in a better place. They imagine the ‘New’, think through the system at play, create the conditions for creativity, designing for momentum and encourage experimentation.

These leaders work with constraints, not against them. They give teams permission to imagine beyond the current state. You will know them by the cultures they build, which make high performance inevitable, not optional.

These leaders embrace risk as they know a risk seen can be designed for.

While others are still waiting for certainty and clarity,  they will experiment and prototype their way forward. They know that in a fast-moving environment, the biggest risk is moving too slowly, not moving too early.

Design-led leaders know that efficiency alone won’t move them forward, and that the status quo is always a temporary state. They know that if they are not designing new services, products, and business models, others will be passing them by.

High-Performing Teams Are Designed

High-performing teams aren't accidents; they're designed. Someone imagined this level of performance and then systematically designed the conditions, processes, and culture to make it inevitable.

These leaders paint vivid visions with tangible stretch goals, as they know their teams will not be motivated by abstract, fuzzy goals. They involve their team to bring these visions to life so that their teams connect strongly with them. They will even create experiences so that their teams can see and feel the compelling future they are all building together.

The Leadership Challenge

Whether you answer to shareholders, citizens, your team or yourself, the question is the same:

• Will you design the future you want to see?

• Or will external forces design it for you?

Leadership is a creative act. Let’s make it intentional. Be designed to lead.

What do you think?

If you would like to understand more about this, please DM me.

In Wellington?  Let’s catch up for coffee. If not, let’s have a virtual coffee chat!

If this resonated, Subscribe to my newsletter get future editions of Leading as Designing—a newsletter for leaders who create and design.